Material Layering Systems in Unreal; What are they? And why you should use them? | #SDC23

Sumo Digital
Sumo Digital
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Published 2023-07-17
Presented by Chris Pollitt at SDC2023 as part of the Art stream.

I've been working as part of the Arrowhead initiative to create a series of general art plugins to enable new projects to hit the ground running, especially if they are starting from scratch. And I've implemented a new shader system which breaks away from the old Ubershader method. The MLS (Material Layering System) has many advantages over older methods for both performance, quality and artist flexibility. And my current project's art team swears by the MLS now as the new standard for art production in games, with several other projects having requested to use my MLS too, so I thought now would probably be as good a time as any to do a talk on it.

Key takeaways
• What is an MLS; How does it differ in structure from traditional systems.
• What are the benefits of using it over others; Performance, Quality, UX, and New Functionality.
• What is the pipeline for using it. As it is a different way of working.
• Some use case examples of the functionality and flexibility you gain from this for production.

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All Comments (18)
  • @Frits_Mulder
    Excellent talk, thanks for all the information!
  • @CalvinSimpson
    Really great stuff to see from Chris, we worked together on Sackboy years ago so it's really awesome to see a big evolution to leverage Unreal's newer tools to solve a lot of the problems we had on that project. Also really happy to see a centralised technical art/tools pipeline been hinted at as this one of my biggest complaints during my time at Sumo.
  • @vanormpg
    This is really inspiring presentation, thanks!
  • @AlexTsekot
    Where would one get access to the Arrowhead Initiative to get the plugins? Are they available to purchase somewhere? Would be super useful to know. Thanks for the insight, awesome video. Its insane how little material layering is being talked about, I see too many assets labelled 'game ready' meanwhile they use x2 4k maps and 2x 2k maps and its like 'game ready' great but for what game...
  • @tor3203
    32:00 arrowhead plug-in. Chris talks about it and implies that it's available to grab. Where do I go? There's no link
  • @paullayton3881
    Hi I really enjoyed lecture, one part that interests me, but I have little to no resources on is the value clamping inside of a packed map and being able to isolate specific gray values. I was wondering if you guys could share any resources that may help me in my endeavors, I've been poking around a few different forms and a lot of my solutions full short of anything useful. Any help you guys could provide would be awesome and appreciated.
  • @wayancientmoon1142
    Hi, I’m currently working on optimizing my project’s materials and am exploring efficient ways to share data, such as masks, tweaked vertex colors, and UV scaling, across different material layers or within material layer blends. I understand that sharing these parameters can significantly simplify the material setup by reducing the redundancy of inputs and potentially streamlining the workflow. However, beyond simplifying parameters, I’m curious about the performance implications of this approach. Could someone explain how to effectively share data like masks, tweaked vertex colors, and UV scaling across material layers or blends? Additionally, does this method of sharing data between layers or blends offer any performance benefits, such as reducing shader complexity or improving render times? I’m particularly interested in understanding if there are best practices or specific techniques within Unreal Engine that facilitate this kind of data sharing while also optimizing material performance. Thank you for your insights!
  • @TheExcelsis
    If this is an internal only setup, is there anything that I could achieve creating this manually from scratch possibly something similar/basic in Unreal? Great presentation by the way 👌.
  • @Jofoyo
    DXT normal compression... Please god no. Artists you "taste test"ed this with must have been blind. It just destroys the shading and looks dog unless every normal is 4k and high texel density.